Battling the culture of the quick buck

The villains who caused the 2008 financial meltdown ran the gamut of society, but arguably their sins were the same. The speculators who did shoddy work on houses to flip them, the brokers who lured unsophisticated buyers into loans they couldn’t afford, and the investment bankers who repackaged those risky loans and unloaded them like a hot potato onto unsuspecting investors, all prioritized short-term greed over long-term profit.

Four years later, the culture of the quick buck is still alive and well. Those are the values in play when bankers make billions betting against their own shady financial products, when Goldman Sachs executives prey upon their own clients, when traders are celebrated for what they can make in a day, rather than what they can build over a decade.

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